Unilever Expects Big Gains From Its RFID Data-Sharing Trial

An EPCIS-based repository, such as the one Unilever is testing, can automatically facilitate two-way communications because it can send and accept XML-based data feeds of RFID information. Software applications and data repositories that incorporate the EPCIS standard will "allow us to have all that RFID read information in one place," Ellis says. "It will make collaborative communication a whole lot easier."

During the first few weeks of the trial, which Unilever is conducting with a few retail partners Ellis declined to name, the firm's employees have continued to extract RFID data manually and compare it with the data being culled from the EPCIS repository. This is being done to ensure the system is working properly.

Next week, Unilever executives will review those comparisons to "make sure they all have the same denominator—that all the read data is coming in and we aren't missing anything," Ellis explains. If that holds true, Unilever will make the EPCIS repository the system of record, and its employees will stop extracting RFID data manually and comparing it with information from the EPCIS repository.

The EPCIS trial is expected to go on through the end of the year. As part of that project, Unilever is applying EPC Gen 2 tags to cases of its products. Ultimately, the pilot will help the consumer goods and retail industries assess the maturity of the EPCIS standard, Ellis explains, and find out whether it is a viable and scaleable solution.

There's no doubt EPCIS will have to be scaleable. Although the trial involves just eight to 10 stock-keeping units (SKUs), it is likely that Unilever will have tagged somewhere in the range of 100,000 cases by the end of the year, and that there will be approximately 10 discrete pieces of read-related information for each case. Such data includes recording the various points where tags are read during the staging and distribution of cases, reads that occur as part of an aggregate read determining which case tags are associated with specific pallet tags. "That puts it somewhere in the range of a million discrete pieces of read-related data," Ellis says. "A big business in North America can easily sell 5 million cases a year, and you start doing the math across multiple read points and you realize you have enormous amounts of data."

The EPCIS trial is just one of the many RFID pilots Unilever has conducted. During an early test in 2002, it participated in a supply chain-tracking project under Britain's "Chipping of Goods" initiative. At the time, Unilever put RFID tags on 30,000 six-packs of Lynx deodorant and monitored them as they moved from a manufacturing plant to three Safeway stores (see Unilever Tracks Lynx With RFID).

Ellis says Unilever will continue with more pilots. "On the one hand, we've made, as an industry, enormous progress in the last four years," he says, "But I'm not sure that we aren't still in the phase of piloting." There are still standards to be ironed out, and there's still concern about costs, interoperability issues "and getting tags on boxes en masse that doesn't involve some kind of manual application process."